BRAVE COMMERCE Podcast Summary

Episode: Kellanova’s Louise Cotterill on Turning Clean Room Data Into Sales Impact and Cultural Change
Date: November 11, 2025
Host: Adweek (Rachel Tipograph & Sarah Hofstetter)
Guest: Lou (Louise) Cotterill, Global Senior Director Insights and Intelligence at Kellanova
Location: Recorded live at Grocery Shop

Episode Overview

This episode explores the real-world impact of data clean rooms, AI, and data-driven marketing at Kellanova (formerly Kellogg’s). Lou Cotterill discusses how to transform vast and complex data into tangible sales results and lasting cultural change within a large CPG organization. The conversation highlights how to win executive buy-in, create actionable insights, foster organizational collaboration, and the critical role of curiosity and pragmatism in a tech-driven marketing future.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Importance of Sales-Focused Marketing Metrics

• [07:18] Lou stresses that the language executives speak is sales. Marketers gain a seat at the table by demonstrating direct, measurable sales impact—not just brand or engagement metrics.

  “If you want to have a seat at the table for the executives, you have to speak their language. And the language they speak is sales.”
  — Lou Cotterill [07:26]

• Clean rooms, for the first time, enable marketers to credibly claim, “this business outcome happened exclusively because of my advertising.”

  “There is no better feeling than walking in and being able to show to that CFO that lift, that impact in the terms they explicitly want to talk about.”
  — Lou Cotterill [07:48]

What is a Clean Room & How Does Kellanova Use It?

• [08:43] Clean rooms aggregate and anonymize retailer and shopper data to create highly actionable, privacy-compliant audiences.

  “Within [our own clean room tenant], we were able to decide what data came in and…what models we wanted to build in order to prioritize and really reflect the business results we were looking for.”
  — Lou Cotterill [09:02]

• Kellanova stands up their own clean room tenants rather than relying solely on retailer clean rooms—controlling costs, customization, and modeling approaches.
  • This enables “closed-loop” impact measurement—knowing not only what worked, but who it worked with and why.

Embedding AI and Building Team Culture for Data-Driven Change

• [13:31] Lou’s role is as much about the cultural process as the technology:
  • Leadership must be open to new ways of working.
  • The organization must act on what the data shows, even if it upends assumptions.

  “You have to have a leadership that's open to a different way of doing things… and if the data tells you to do something different, you act on it.”
  — Lou Cotterill [13:35]

• Business-as-usual targeting continues alongside clean room-driven targeting, so teams feel safe to experiment without “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Reducing Bias and Ensuring Actionability in Data

• [16:24] Use independent data science teams for audience discovery (to avoid bias), and third-party measurement for verifying sales impact.

  “They’ve got no skin in the game. They just produce what the models tell them… then independent, verified measurement... is really critical as well.”
  — Lou Cotterill [16:30]

Executive Alignment and Cross-Functional Collaboration

• [17:43] Success requires everyone aligning behind solving a single, common business problem—resisting the urge to focus only on their own functional KPIs.

  “It's really important… that everyone has a line behind the one common problem… getting a unification of what the problem is, so that you're pulling the right levers at the right time in the right sequence.”
  — Lou Cotterill [17:59]

• Cohesive KPIs across teams foster unity and help avoid vanity metrics or siloed successes.

Special K UK Case Study: Actioning Audience Data for Sales Impact

• [19:17] Special K faced declining volume & parity with private label during a cost-of-living crisis.
  • Business-as-usual targeting (one creative, one audience) was inefficient.
  • Clean rooms allowed building large “behavioral” cohorts—beyond basic demographics—across multiple addressable datasets (despite lacking 1P data).
  • Creative and media were tailored to these behavioral segments.
  • Result: 36% sales uplift vs. control.

  “Special K at 36% sales uplift versus the control, which was a phenomenal result for us.”
  — Lou Cotterill [21:13]

Organizational Change: Crawl, Walk, Run

• Clean rooms started as a tactical tool, then insights expanded upstream to inform creative briefs, media strategies, and broader measurement.
• Embedding change means considering not only business outcomes, but also team wellbeing, process alignment, tech partnership fit, and sustained behavioral change.

  “Unless you can actually embed a change, it isn’t going to sustain… behavior change is really critical because otherwise, you can’t sustain it.”
  — Lou Cotterill [22:41]

The Future of Personalized Marketing & Clean Rooms

• Marketers must balance AI’s promise with realism:
  • True one-to-one personalization isn’t commercially or technically feasible at large scale today.
  • Marketers should “meet the consumer where they are”—whether personalization is static, dynamic, or somewhere in between.
  • Clean rooms (and agentic AI) are still in their infancy, evolving rapidly but requiring pragmatism.

  “The key is that you've got to meet the consumer where they are and meet their expectations. And that’s the number one thing a marketer has to do.”
  — Lou Cotterill [25:17]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Action-Oriented Culture:

  “You have to be open that if the data tells you to do something different, you act on it.”
  — Lou Cotterill [02:13], [13:35]

• Eliminating Bias:

  “The starting model is the data science team…I can tell you they've got no real sort of strong feelings about who Special K should be and no bias in legacy data like our marketers have.”
  — Lou Cotterill [16:24]

• Meeting Consumers Where They Are:

  “Where we're moving to is a more dynamic picture of who the consumer is. The key is that you've got to meet the consumer where they are and meet their expectations.”
  — Lou Cotterill [25:17]

Key Timestamps

• [02:13], [13:35]: Action on data without bias
• [07:18]: Speaking the language of the CFO & sales impact
• [08:43]: What’s a clean room, and Kellanova’s approach
• [13:31]: Organizational prerequisites for data-driven change
• [16:24]: How to eliminate internal data bias
• [17:43]: The necessity of unified KPIs
• [19:17]: Special K case study – audience segmentation and real-world results
• [21:51]: Connecting people, product, placement for cohesive execution
• [24:10]: Honest assessment of AI and practical personalization
• [26:44]: Being pragmatic and learning as you go
• [26:52]: Bravest thing professionally: admitting non-stellar results and asking for more
• [27:39]: Bravest personal story: living with nomadic eagle hunters in Mongolia

Personal & Human Insights

• Professional Bravery:

  • Lou’s bravest professional act was admitting less-than-stellar results to top execs and still asking for continued investment.

    “The bravest thing was walking into a global meeting...telling them we had not had stellar results on a clean room and asking for more money.”
    — Lou Cotterill [26:52]

• Personal Adventure:

  • Lou and her husband lived with nomadic eagle hunters in Mongolia, embracing deep discomfort and the unknown.

    “It was a really incredible way to kind of connect into nature and see a lifestyle that you just may never have seen before...”
    — Lou Cotterill [27:39]

Conclusion: The Power of Curiosity

Rachel closes the episode tying together Lou’s professional and personal stories:

“You have an insatiable curiosity about you, and it allows you to be a phenomenal marketer and a phenomenal [person].”
— Rachel Tippograph [30:34]

Key Takeaways for Marketers

• Action is everything: Data, no matter how sophisticated, must lead to concrete marketing actions and sales results.
• Culture changes first: Leadership must be open to change, and new tech should be tested alongside old approaches, not blindly replacing them.
• Bias busting needs structure: Use third-party and independent teams for assessment and measurement.
• Curiosity and pragmatism are essential: Embrace new technologies, but always with a practical eye for what’s actionable and aligned with your business reality.
• Personal bravery underpins professional innovation: Both require the courage to step into the unknown.

For further learning:
If you found this episode valuable, Rachel and Sarah mention recent episodes featuring other Kellanova leaders at Shop Talk Europe and in prior interviews—find those in your podcast app under BRAVE COMMERCE.